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Bluebook 21st ed.
Shadd Maruna, Reentry as a Rite of Passage, 13 Punishment & Soc’y 3 (2011).
ALWD 7th ed.
Shadd Maruna, Reentry as a Rite of Passage, 13 Punishment & Soc’y 3 (2011).
APA 7th ed.
Maruna, S. (2011). Reentry as rite of passage. Punishment and Society, 13(1), 3-28.
Chicago 17th ed.
Shadd Maruna, “Reentry as a Rite of Passage,” Punishment and Society 13, no. 1
(January 2011): 3-28
McGill Guide 9th ed.
Shadd Maruna, “Reentry as a Rite of Passage” (2011) 13:1 Punishment & Soc’y 3.
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Shadd Maruna, ‘Reentry as a Rite of Passage’ (2011) 13(1) Punishment and Society 3
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Maruna, Shadd. “Reentry as a Rite of Passage.” Punishment and Society, vol. 13, no.
1, January 2011, pp. 3-28. HeinOnline.
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Article
Punishment & Society
Reentry as a rite
of passage
of pa sageDOl:
13(1) 3-28
@
The Author(s) 2011
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10. 1177/1462474510385641
pun.sagepub.com
$SAGE
Shadd Maruna
Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Abstract
Mary Douglas argues that, ‘There are some things we cannot experience without ritual?
Ex-prisoner reintegration may be one of them. The punishment process involves an
inordinate amount of ritual behavior, from the drama of the courtroom to the elaborate
de-individuation processes involved in institutionalization. Durkheim argues that these
rituals serve a distinct purpose for society: engendering social solidarity and shaping
penal sensibilities. Like the commission of a crime, the reintegration of the former
outcast back into society represents a challenge to the moral order, a delicate transition
fraught with danger and possibility. However, unlike punishment, reintegration is not a
process characterized by well-orchestrated and familiar rituals. This lack might explain
the failings of prisoner reentry in contemporary society. This article reviews the sociological and anthropological literature on rituals, explaining what they are and what they
do, focusing in particular on the role of status degradation ceremonies in criminal justice
work. Drawing on this literature, the core elements that would be needed to develop
rituals of reintegration powerful enough to counteract these degradation effects are
discussed, and the potential impact of such hypothetical rituals is explored.
Keywords
ex-prisoners, parole, reentry, rites of passage, rituals
Over forty years ago, Gorer (1965) made the radical argument that the British were
uniquely poor at coping with death. In particular, compared to the elaborate
Corresponding author:
Shadd Maruna, Queen’s University Belfast, Institute of Criminology and Criminal justice, School of Law,
28 University Square, Belfast, Northern Ireland, BT7 INN, UK
Email: [email protected]
4
Punishment & Society 13(1)
mourning practices found in most cultures, British society had an absence of adequate bereavement rituals to help mourners express and work through their grief.
Gorer argued that the consequences of this societal inadequacy included ‘public
callousness toward the loss of human life and a preoccupation with violence in the
mass media’ (Scheff, 1979: 113).
In this article, I make a similar case in the realm of ex-prisoner reintegration.
I argue that contemporary Anglo-American societies (not just Britain, but Britain
represents a typical example) are particularly bad at reintegrating and re-accepting individuals who have committed offenses back into wider society (see
Petersilia, 2003; Travis, 2005). Evidence of this failing can be found in the
rates of released prisoners being returned to prison (Kubrin and Stewart,
2006), as well as in the high rates of suicide among recently released ex-prisoners
in the United States (Binswanger et al., 2007), Australia (Kariminia et al., 2007)
and the United Kingdom (Pratt et al., 2006). Equally telling is the preoccupation
that the Anglo-American media has with the release of prisoners – a prime
example of which was the media-fueled panic following the British government’s
recent decision to release a large number of prisoners 18 days earlier than their
scheduled release date to clear space in the overcrowded prison system (Ford,
2007).
I will argue that one part of the reason for this societal difficulty involves the
failure to understand the dynamics of ritual in facilitating crucial life transitions
like reintegration. The influential British anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966/2002:
80) argues that, ‘There are some things we cannot experience without ritual.’ In this
article, I make the case that ex-prisoner reintegration may be one of them. As a
society, we make an impressive ritual of punishment – from the drama of the
courtroom to the elaborate de-individuation processes involved in institutionalization. Yet, when it comes to reintegration – turning prisoners back into citizens – we
typically forgo all such ritual and try to make the process as stealthy and private as
possible, if we make any effort at all. This contradiction may account for why the
imprisonment of human beings is taken for granted as ‘normal’ or even ‘natural’,
and yet the return of the same human beings to communities is the cause of often
inordinate concern.
If terms like ‘reintegration’ or ‘reentry’ are to be meaningful, this process presumably involves more than just physical resettlement into society after incarceration (e.g. a place to stay, a source of income – as important as those are), but also
includes a symbolic element of moral inclusion (see Braithwaite, 1989). It is in this
expressive/symbolic terrain – involving seemingly anachronistic concepts such as
atonement, forgiveness, redemption, and reconciliation – that the extensive, contemporary discussion of prisoner reentry seems to be the most silent. Yet, as
Braithwaite and Mugford (1994) argue, it may be that these intangible processes
of status elevation are among the more critical components of the reintegration
process.
In developing this argument, I first review the basic sociology of ritual, seeking
to define what ritual is, and what rituals do. I then examine what role rituals
Maruna
5
currently play in the correctional process, before imagining what effective rituals of
reintegration might look like. This is an imaginative, theoretical exercise. That is,
I am not evaluating or assessing actual reintegration rituals (although scattered
examples exist in correctional practices already – see Burrell, 2004; Wexler, 2001).
Instead, I try to lay out the basics of what elements might be necessary for idealtype reintegration rituals in the abstract. In doing so, I draw on the work of
Durkheim and his contemporary Arnold Van Gennep, but also on more contemporary scholars working in a neo-Durkheimian tradition, including Mary Douglas
(1966/2002), Kai Erikson (2005 [1966]) and Thomas Scheff (1979), but especially
John Braithwaite (1989) and Randall Collins (2004). This work, then, is part of a
larger situationalist trend in correctional research (see, for example, Haney, 2006)
that foregrounds the power of the situation, rather than the internal qualities of the
individual, as in the slogan: ‘Encounters make their encountees’ (Collins, 2004: 5).
My goal, though, is specifically to revise interest in the power of rituals
in criminology.
In addition, this article is also a call for thinking anew about the way criminal
justice sanctions (including community sentences) end. Although overlooked in
criminal justice (where our attention is typically on front-door practices of
arrest, conviction, and sentencing), ‘endings’ can be a rich area to explore.
Considerable psychological research on recall and affect suggests that retrospective
evaluations of personal experiences are driven almost entirely by two factors – the
moment at which affect was most extreme and the conclusion of the experience
(see, for example, Diener et al., 2001; Kahneman, 2000). Retrospective evaluations
show little or no sensitivity to duration and appear instead to be biased strongly to
the final moments of whatever activity is experienced. So, a film with a weak ending
will be judged as unsatisfying even if the first hour was engaging. A short vacation
that ends with a magic final evening may be treasured more than a longer holiday
that ends on a down note and so forth. I argue that criminal sanctions, for the most
part, end very badly. Indeed, by most accounts, they do not end at all. Except for a
very fortunate few who have their offenses formally forgiven through pardons or
other legal means, individuals with felony records can remain permanently stigmatized, excluded from employment, educational and social opportunities, on the
grounds of something they did many years or decades earlier (see Pager, 2007;
Travis, 2005). The resulting cycle of stigma and recidivism is predictable and
tragic (Chiricos et al., 2007), but could conceivably be broken with rituals of reintegration among other factors.
Resurrecting ritual studies
The study of ritual was central to the growth of anthropology and sociology in the
19th century. One of the so-called ‘fathers’ of modern sociology, Emile Durkheim,
assigned rituals a prominent role in his theory of societal dynamics. Durkheim
(1895/1966) argued that punishment, for instance, was not really directed at the
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Punishment & Society 13(1)
individual being deterred or reformed, but rather was a public ritual designed to
restore a sense of social order to the wider community:
Crime, therefore, draws honest consciences together, concentrating them. We have
only to observe what happens, particularly in a small town, when some scandal
involving morality has just taken place. People stop each other in the street, call
upon one another, meet in their customary places to talk about what has happened.
(Durkheim, 1893/1964: 58)
Importantly, he argued that these ‘honest consciences’ were both shaped and
sustained through the practice of penal rituals. According to Durkheim, punishment ‘transforms a threat to social order into a triumph of social solidarity… [through] a socially binding ritual of moral affirmation’ (Garland, 1991:
123). Rather than being a product of collective morality, then, the reaction to
crime is itself said to be the source of that morality, suggesting crime plays a key
part in maintaining social order.
One might expect that an idea with this pedigree and such a clear relevance for
understanding justice practices would be a central concept for criminology. Yet,
with some notable exceptions (e.g. Braithwaite and Mugford, 1994; Garland,
1990), ritual research has made relatively little impact on the sociology of punishment in recent decades. Indeed, Smith (2008: 335) argues that Durkheim’s immense
contributions to criminology have been badly neglected in general, and that
‘Durkheim is in need of redemption and recognition’ in our field.
Resistance to ritual research in contemporary criminology has two primary
explanations. First, there is a perception that rituals are declining in importance
in contemporary societies or that the rituals Durkheim wrote about are anachronistic and irrelevant in late modernity. Second, the Durkheimian view of rituals is
seen as inherently conservative, celebrating tradition and presuming a shared value
system across societies. Both of these concerns are well grounded, but neither is a
good rationale for abandoning Durkheim’s primary insights about ritual.
First, it is true that contemporary society has undergone what anthropological
observers describe as a process of ‘deritualization’ (Mandelbaum, 1959), whereby
traditional, religious-based rituals, in particular, have declined in their significance.
A general ‘poverty of ritual’ in contemporary society is blamed for numerous social
problems, but especially a decline in community spirit and mutual trust (see especially Driver, 1991). Yet, it is hard to believe that ritual no longer plays any role in
modern cultures when one considers that the average amount spent on a wedding
ceremony in the USA is estimated to be around $30,000 (Wong, 2005). At least
since Max Gluckman (1962), the socio-anthropological understanding of ritual has
rejected the idea that rituals necessarily involve religious or spiritual themes.
Football fans chanting in unison for their team may not recognize that they are
unconsciously building a sense of unity or turning high-paid athletes into sacred
objects, but neo-Durkheimians would argue that this is precisely what they are
achieving with their deeply ritualistic behavior (see Collins, 2004). Participants in
Maruna
7
‘raves’, rock concerts, stand-up comedy shows, and birthday parties are doing
much the same, which helps to explain why individuals will go to such lengths
and pay such high costs to engage in these activities. Indeed, Goffman (1966) drew
attention to the ubiquity of minor, everyday rituals throughout social interactions,
arguing that everything from salutations in written correspondence to the making
of a toast at a dinner party can be best understood if analyzed as ritualized events
on a micro scale.
Second, there is also truth to the argument that Durkheim’s original analysis of
ritual is a largely conservative one. For instance, Durkheim argued that penal
rituals served to reinforce a shared sense of collective morality and did not question
the legitimacy of power and authority within a society (Garland, 1991; Smith,
2008). Yet, ritual scholars who have followed Durkheim have underplayed this
aspect of Durkheim’s project. Neo-Durkheimians like Erikson (2005 [1966]) and
Garfinkel (1956) emphasize, for instance, that penal rituals can evoke strong social
divisions, especially in divided societies, with one group united in support and
others united in opposition of a punishment (Garland, 1991). Likewise, Collins
(2004) seeks to rescue Durkheim’s theory from accusations of conservative functionalism by arguing that the ‘collective conscience’ that Durkheim famously
describes ‘can exist in little pockets rather than as one huge sky covering everybody
in the society’ (Collins, 2004: 15). This new understanding makes the neoDurkheimian model ‘entirely compatible with a view of stratification and group
conflict’ (Collins, 2004: 41). Finally, numerous scholars, drawing on insights from
the Manchester School of Anthropology (Gluckman, 1962; Turner, 1969), have
argued that far from preserving tradition, rituals can be creative, imaginative, even
subversive (Braithwaite and Mugford, 1994; Garland, 1991). While rejecting
aspects of Durkheim’s overall theory, then, the new Durkheimians have sought
to preserve Durkheim’s fundamental argument regarding the important communicative power of rituals.
What do rituals do?
Collins (2004: 7) defines ritual as ‘a mechanism of mutually focused emotion and
attention producing a momentarily shared reality, which thereby generates solidarity and symbols of group membership.’ Above all, a ritual is a medium of
communication, with its own symbolic grammar and syntax, although on the surface, ritual behavior has the appearance of being non-utilitarian or even irrational
(see, for example, Oakdale, 2005). So, shaking hands upon meeting someone is
clearly ritualistic; it serves no clear practical purpose (indeed spreads germs), but
serves a substantial symbolic role in many cultures (try not shaking hands the next
time you are introduced to someone and note the impact on social dynamics). On
the other hand, turning a key to start the engine of a car is not a ritual; the action
serves a direct, instrumental purpose and is not meant to signal anything wider.
(At the same time, revving the engine of the car by depressing the accelerator in
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Punishment & Society 13(1)
short, sharp bursts at a traffic light certainly has ritualistic qualities, as a means
for adolescent males and others to symbolically convey a message to others
around them.)
Why do we engage in seemingly pointless rituals? Rituals appear to perform a
crucial, cathartic function when individuals are facing epistemically threatening life
events, especially transitions and turning points (Durkheim, 1912/1995). Scheff
(1979: 133) writes, ‘Effective ritual is the solution to a seemingly insoluable problem, the management of collectively held, otherwise unmanageable distress.’
Drawing on cognitive dissonance theory, Marshall (2002) accounts for rituals by
arguing that individuals spontaneously engage in ‘effortful, binding action’ in ‘the
face of uncertainty’ as a means of reducing anxiety. The life ‘crises’ that trigger
rituals can be big or small (Gluckman, 1962). A funeral rite is a means of coping
with the substantial trauma of loss and fears of our own immortality. The ritual’s
‘ostensible object is the dead person, but it benefits not the dead, but the living.’
(Firth, 1951: 63) Yet, smaller, transitional ‘crises’ also trigger rituals in everyday
interactions. Ritual goodbyes (often phrased as ‘see you later’ or ‘until next time’)
are a way of managing the awkwardness of cutting off correspondence with an
acquaintance (Chapple, 1970), for example.
The anxiety-reducing function of ritual is nowhere more important than in
what the Belgian folklorist Arnold Van Gennep (1909/1960: 4) first called ‘rites of
passage’, defined as the rituals ‘which accompany every change of place, state,
social position and age.’ Rites of passage include remarkably persistent practices
such as hazing rituals in college fraternities, high school graduations, military
boot camp initiations, bachelor (or ‘stag’) parties, and bar mitzvahs (Bell, 1997;
Grimes, 2000). Van Gennep (1960: 3) argues that there was ‘a wide degree of
general similarity’ among all of these ‘ceremonies of birth, childhood, social
puberty, betrothal, marriage, pregnancy, fatherhood, initiation into religious societies and funerals.’
In short, Van Gennep argued that such rituals typically followed a tripartite
processual scheme involving separation from everyday reality, a period of liminality, then reintegration as a new person (see Deflem, 1991). Crucial here is the
notion of liminality: ‘betwixt and between’ two distinct stages where old configurations of certainty and identity are no longer present but where there is as yet no
new configuration (Turner, 1969). ‘Liminal personae’ or ‘threshold people’ shed
their former identities, but what they shall become is not yet known. They stand
outside the normal structures of society in a liminal state characterized by jeopardy
and promise (Bell, 1997; Turner, 1969).
Van Gennep argued that these rites of passage did not just accompany biological
changes and development. To the contrary, social rituals could be exercised ‘so as
to try to dominate the imperatives of biology’ (Bell, 1997). In other words, the
developmental transition follows rather than precedes the ritualization. Numerous
developmentalists – Otto Rank, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Erik Erikson – have
incorporated this idea of ‘rites of passage’ into their understandings of the process
of human individuatation and development. According to this model, ‘adults are
Maruna
9
not born, but made’ (Grimes, 2000: 147). Adulthood (or more accurately ‘manhood’ or ‘womanhood’) does not arrive naturally or spontaneously, but is ritually
constructed through ‘socially orchestrated training that is learned and mastered
despite difficult obstacles’ (Bell, 1997: 101). Rites of passage become the ‘events
that we remember, that give meaning to our personal biographies’ (Collins, 2004:
43), hence shaping our self-narratives and personal identities.
Rituals, then, are said to play a particularly powerful role in the shaping
of human sensibility and imagination. They create mental states, not simply
express them (Bell, 1997; Grimes, 2000). Douglas (1966/2002: 79, emphasis
added) writes,
Ritual focuses attention by framing; it enlivens memory and links the present with the
relevant past…. So it is not enough to say that ritual helps us to experience more
vividly what we would have experienced anyway. It can come first in formulating
experience.
Most immediately, successful rituals are ’emotion transformers’ generating what
Collins (2004) calls ’emotional energy’, making participants ‘feel strong, confident,
full of impulses to take the initiative’ (Collins, 2004: xii). Unconsciously,
Durkheimian theory suggests, this energy also triggers feelings of both belief and
belonging (Marshall, 2002). Rituals engender solidarity and social cohesion by
bringing people together in common cause; this community bonding is then
thought to serve the purpose of generating beliefs about standards of morality
(Durkheim, 1912/1995). We come to ‘know’ right and wrong through the enactment of ritual behaviors, according to Durkheim. Indeed, Marshall (2002: 370)
argues that rituals can produce ‘a quasireligious hardening’ of beliefs: ‘This lets us
make sense of why social movements involving voluntary abstinence, such as temperance, smoking cessation, and vegetarianism, so often and easily become moralized’ (2002: 370).
The impact of ignoring ritual
If rituals are this important in the shaping of lives, then it is worth considering what
might happen when ritual is ignored or bypassed. In particular, what do anthropologists suggest happens when status passages and transitions are not accompanied by ritual practices? Grimes (2000: 5-6) provides one colorful suggestion in this
regard:
The primary work of a rite of passage is to ensure that we attend to such events fully,
which is to say, spiritually, psychologically and socially. Unattended, a major life
passage can become a yawning abyss, draining off psychic energy, engendering
social confusion, and twisting the course of the life that follows it. Unattended passages become spiritual sinkholes around which hungry ghosts, those greedy personifications of unfinished business, hover.
Punishment & Society 13(1)
10
The poverty of ritual in modern societies is frequently blamed for feelings of
alienation and the demise of community (Driver, 1991). In particular, young people
are thought to suffer from the lack of clearly demarcated rituals for achieving an
adult status (see, for example, Moffitt, 1993). For instance, Paul Hill, founder of
the National Rites of Passage Institute 1 in Cleveland, Ohio, argues that ‘[i]dentity,
community, history, spirituality, and the environment are all at stake in the decision to initiate, or not to initiate, adolescents into adulthood’ (cited in Grimes,
2000: 147).
Maybe the most obvious ‘greedy personification of unfinished business’ in
urban cultures is the existence of youth gangs. Glynn (2007) argues that gang
crime and criminal justice involvement fills a ritual void in the lives of urban
youth who seek out ways of demonstrating their masculinity and toughness.
Indeed, such ideas have a long-standing, if overlooked, place in the criminological
literature. In their classic book, The Gang, for instance, Bloch and Niederhoffer
(1958: 28) argued: ‘It is almost as if the contemporary young person, in the
absence of puberty rituals and ordeals, is moved to exclaim: If you don’t care
to test us, then we will test ourselves!’ After all, much delinquency itself – from
vandalism to joyriding to youth violence – meets the criteria of what Hall
and Jefferson (1976) call ‘rituals of resistance’, with its symbol-laden, noninstrumentality. The behaviors are not rational, but serve a crucial developmental
purpose.
At the extreme end of such do-it-yourself ritualism, of course, are the elaborate
rites and rituals of gang initiation and membership, where wars are fought and
young lives are lost over the wearing of certain colors, the flashing of certain hand
signs, and the protection of symbolic turf. The South African criminologist Don
Pinnock (1998: 19-20) argues:
In the history of all of our cultures, and in cultures people call ‘primitive’ today,
adolescent boys face ordeals and trials that test their manhood and courage…. In
our urban cultures, which have lost their ancient roots through migration, poverty or
dilution, young people continue to have (and act on) the same needs. Where ritual is
absent, it is created…. Research into gangs suggested a new, hard look at their rituals
– which led to the conclusion that the best way to beat gangs might be to make better,
richer, more ritual-filled, gang-like groups. (Pinnock, 1998: 18-20)
Rites of passage in criminal justice
Many observers have argued that imprisonment itself has become a normative ‘rite
of passage’ for disadvantaged young men (see, for example, Mauer, 2005; Ogilvie
and Van Zyl, 2001; Ortiz, 2005). Such an argument would have a great deal of
support from the anthropological literature on rituals (although imprisonment is
Maruna
II
not discussed in these works directly). Consider, for instance, the following description of Van Gennep’s stages:
The first stage, separation, is often marked by rites of purification and symbolic
allusions to the loss of the old identity (in effect, death to the old self): the person
is bathed, hair is shaved, clothes are switched, marks are made on the body, and so on.
In the second or transition stage, the person is kept for a time in a place that is
symbolically outside the conventional sociocultural order…: normal routines are
suspended while rules distinctive to this state are carefully followed. (Bell, 1997: 36)
In the liminal state, persons are said to have ‘have no status, property, insignia,
secular clothing, rank, kinship position, nothing to demarcate them structurally
from their fellows’ (Turner, 1967: 99). Identically dressed and treated, liminal personae have a ‘sameness’ that leads to a sense of ‘communitas’, a deep and lasting
bond for those who go through the experience together (Turner, 1967: 99).
This description of liminality sounds like an almost perfect description of the
imprisonment ritual. The difference is at the end, however. This is Van Gennep’s
third and last act in his stage-theory of rituals:
In the third stage, symbolic acts of incorporation focus on welcoming the person into
a new status (in effect, birth of the new self): there is the conferral of a new name and
symbolic insignia, usually some form of communal meal, and so on. (Bell, 1997: 36)
The imprisonment ritual as practiced, then, takes people out of normal society,
initiates an extended period of extreme liminality, but does not take advantage of
this to effect change. If prison is a rite of passage, then, the direction it leads is
clearly down.
Garfinkel (1956: 420) refers to punishment practices as ‘status degradation ceremonies’ or ‘communicative work directed to transforming an individual’s total
identity.’ In undergoing these ritualistic interactions, a person starts out as one
status (presumably a ‘person’ or ‘citizen’), and emerges at the other end as a different entity altogether – an ‘offender’ or ‘criminal’. Garfinkel (1956: 421) writes:
‘The paradigm of moral indignation is public denunciation. We publicly deliver the
curse: “I call upon all men to bear witness that he is not as he appears but is
otherwise and in essence of a lower species.”‘
Garfinkel’s degradation ceremony applies primarily to the criminal trial; however, these public denunciations are supported by later institutional processes
associated with incarceration. In Asylums, for instance, Goffman (1961: 14)
describes a ritual process of ‘mortification’ or the depersonalization of a person’s
former identity through the ‘abasements, degradations, humiliations and profanations of self’ common to total institutions. The prisoner undergoes a ‘civil
death’, losing former citizen rights and liberties, but also a distinct set of ritualistic
12
Punishment & Society 13(1)
–
admission procedures – undressing, strip searching, and disinfecting the individual, assigning him or her a new institutional uniform, haircut, and living quarters
and ‘obedience tests’ meant to break the individual’s personality, including
enforced verbal acts of deference (‘You call me, “Sir”, if you want to ask a
question’). The most significant loss to the self, according to Goffman, is the
loss of one’s full name, with prisoners being referred to either by numbers or
their family name. Sykes (1958) describes this stripping away of one’s identity as
among the primary pains of incarceration. The prisoner has to define and establish himself without recourse to a spouse, a brand of clothing, a distinctive car or
home; all the identity materials that the rest of us rely upon for establishing our
individuality are stripped away.
Finally, as argued by labeling theorists (e.g. Becker, 1963; Lemert, 1951), these
ritual humiliations tend to continue even after the person leaves prison, with formerly incarcerated people continuing to wear ‘invisible stripes’ (LeBel, 2006) on the
outside. This stigmatization manifests itself in laws denying ex-prisoners the right
to vote or cross borders freely, as well as serious obstacles to finding housing and
employment (Leong, 2006; Pager, 2007; Travis, 2005). Erikson (1962: 311)
describes the prisoner’s degradation process as ‘a sharp rite of transition at once
moving him out of his normal position in society and transferring him into a
distinctive deviant role.’ Erikson (1962: 311) in fact warns that the deviant label
is ‘almost irreversible’ once applied.
Imagining rituals of reintegration
Although it is certainly true that the stigma of a felony conviction is extremely
difficult to transcend, this pessimistic assumption of ‘irreversibility’ has been contradicted by the findings of the desistance literature. Longitudinal, life course
research has found that most former prisoners do eventually move out of lives
of crime (e.g. Laub and Sampson, 2001). Indeed, Maruna (2001: ch. 8) found that
one part of the process of moving away from crime involved organic interactive
processes that might be referred to as ‘redemption rituals’. In what remains of
this article, I will outline the beginnings of a theory of what such rituals might
look like if they were to be established more widely. In doing so, I first draw on
what little criminological research exists on status elevation rituals. As this material is limited, I then draw upon the neo-Durkheimian literature on ritual to
analyze this further. My goal here is not to outline a prescriptive policy proposal
or a ready-made ‘how to’ for probation departments or reentry programs interested in ritual. Rather, the hope is that a better theoretical understanding of the
literature on rituals could inform creative thinking from others around reintegration policy and practice.
Ritual ‘usually develops around recurring sources of collective distress’ as a way
of coping with such anxiety-producing transitions (Scheff, 1979: 111). Like the
commission of a crime, the reentry of former prisoners represents a threat or
challenge to the moral order, a delicate transition fraught with danger
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and possibility. Successful reintegration is a two-way process, requiring both effort
on the part of the former prisoner (e.g. desistance, repentance), but also on the part
of some wider community (e.g. forgiveness, acceptance). As such, reintegration
appears to be an ideal candidate for the implementation of rituals that, by their
nature, are supposed to generate feelings of solidarity and community among
participants.
In fact, elements of reintegration rituals can be found in existing interventions as
disparate as drug courts and other speciality courts (Wexler, 2001), wilderness
challenge programs (Russell, 2001), circles of support (Walker et al., 2006), boot
camps (Benda et al., 2006), therapeutic communities (Seltzer and Gabor, 2009),
and more general rehabilitation practices (Burrell, 2004). Indeed, restorative justice
interventions have already insp
